Adventurous, ambitious and ingeniously futuristic, "Sleep Dealer" is a welcome surprise. It combines visually arresting science fiction done on a budget with a strong sense of social commentary in a way that few films attempt, let alone achieve.
Writer and director Alex Rivera succeeded so well with "Sleep Dealer" that it won twice at Sundance, taking the coveted Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award plus the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for a film dealing with science. Although influenced by a variety of films, including "Blade Runner" and "The Matrix," this futuristic story remains distinctively itself.
Rivera, who co-wrote the script with David Riker, calls his film "science fiction with many anchors in today's reality," and its ideas about timely issues such as the privatization of water and the place of immigrant labor in the global economy are pointed and effective. But the first thing you notice about "Sleep Dealer" is its vivid, sensual use of color and its ability to make an imaginary world seem real.
Though Rivera has been playing around with the ideas in "Sleep Dealer" for years in shorts and videos, this is his first theatrical feature, and he wisely chose to collaborate with veteran cinematographer Lisa Rinzler, whose diverse resume includes concert films, "Pollock" and "Menace ll Society."
Rinzler persuaded Rivera to shoot on Super 16 instead of digitally to give the film its effective warm and grainy look. Although its resources were limited, "Sleep Dealer" also makes beautiful use of a pastel neon color palette, with key pieces of futuristic equipment highlighted with unusual shades of blue, red and green.
The film is set in Mexico and is almost entirely in Spanish (with English subtitles). Its opening sequences, located in a tiny farming town in Oaxaca called Santa Ana del Rio, look the opposite of futuristic -- except that a few years back, a multinational corporation dammed up the local river and armed guards and surveillance cameras now enforce exorbitant payment for water usage.
Twentysomething Memo (Luis Fernando Pena), the son of a farmer, is something of a techno geek, addicted to hacking into telephone conversations. One night, he eavesdrops on one conversation too many and the result so affects his family that Memo decides to leave town and head for Tijuana, a center for the new global economy, a place where serious money can be made.
